Nance's Kitchen

I ran Earth Class Mail as CEO for a couple years and loved my time there.  I am still a customer for our MovingCompanyReviews.com business and finally got around to writing a review for it, including a bunch of screenshots, pricing, and a breakdown of the features (including their check deposit).  Check it out here – Earth Class Mail Review.

Quick aside about their check deposit service – I used to love it, but for the two checks we get per month, $10 per check was just enough to dissuade me not to use it.  Instead I just print out a Chase deposit slip and mail it in.

What fun is life without a few side projects?

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you a super-easy way to run SQL reports in Slack, SQLBot.co.

What’s you say?  You’d rather use sp_send_dbmail  instead because you love MS SQL Server more than life itself?   Well, go for it.   For those of us who enjoy saving time and aggravation, give SQLBot.co a spin.

Right now we support SQL Server, Postgres, MySql and (can you believe it) Amazon Redshift.    You can schedule reports or call them real time right from within Slack using the SQLBot slack bot.   Fun stuff.  Enjoy!

I’ve been hacking away on a personal budgeting app on my train rides and ran into a squirrely problem in rails 5.   My budgeting app uses the spectacular Quovo API (https://api.quovo.com/docs/v3/) to pull transactions from my Chase accounts.  Quovo rocks, it’s like Plaid or Yodlee, but has a free plan that gives you 100 free connections.

Anyway, the Quovo API brings back connections  and accounts, among other things.   The problem was that the webhooks came with the account information before the connection info.  I have my models set up with the connection as a parent to the child accounts.    Every time I tried to save the account without the connection created first, I got this error:

ActiveRecord::RecordInvalid: Validation failed: Connection must exist

30 minutes of diligent Googling led me to this great YouTube video by Ruby Thursday (https://twitter.com/rubythurs).

The answer?  The optional: true parameter, set like this:

class Account < ApplicationRecord
  belongs_to :connection, optional: true 

I added that and bang!  No more issues.

One of my favorite co-workers in the last few years is my good friend Steven Maguire.    He’s one part hilarious, one part brilliant, and one part pragmatic.  One of my best coding memories from the last few years was figuring out how to fill in pdf’s using prawn, rails, and a handful of other gems to power form filling at EarthClassMail and to help people file medical claim forms online.

Steven loves to build fun things with a minimum of cost, and recently launched his newest funny venture, FootBallCropTop.com.   If you’re in the market for Wisconsin Badger crop tops, this is the site for you!

On a dev note, if you’ve ever wrestled with the ShareASale API and ShareASale coupon feeds, check out Steven’s article on how he elegantly handled both.   He gives a full rundown on how to use Github pages, Jekyll, AWS Lambda, and a handful of other tech to host a dynamic affiliate site for (basically) free.    Amazing stuff.

We thought about reading in ShareASale’s coupon feed for moving boxes for MovingCompanyReviews.com (if you’re looking for Chicago movers, Orlando movers, or movers in any other city check it out!), but punted b/c we found it too hard to be worth it.  Kudos to Steven for figuring it out!

It’s been waaaaaaaaay to long since I’ve posted.   A lot’s happened since then.   Let me recap:

• I took over as CEO of HomeFinder.com
• We shut down MoverWebsites.com
• At HomeFinder, we launched an internal startup called MovingCompanyReviews.com
• I left HomeFinder.com to be CEO of EarthClassMail.com in 2015
• I ended up buying MovingCompanyReviews.com from HomeFinder in 2016

Phew!   I am happy to report that MovingCompanyReviews.com is alive and well, and doing better than ever.   It’s a really great site to find mover – we verify every review with a moving receipt (called a bill of lading), so consumers can trust the reviews they read on site.   For example, check out our Boise, ID movers.   We don’t have a ton of reviews there yet, but Big Boy Movers is a quality company that treats people right.

We’ve got some great features coming out – including giving consumers free pizza on their move days.  Who doesn’t love free pizza?

We’ve also got some great free moving leads programs for movers, as well as a killer review collection product where movers can give free coffee to past customers, and a cool “recommended movers” page that gives top real estate agents free advertising and exposure.

More to come soon!

Time to bang the gong again, we’ve got a new MoverWebsites.com customer live!   If you need Huntsville Al Movers or Fayetteville TN Movers, then head on over to GeneralMovingServices.com.     General Moving Services serves the Huntsville Alabama and Fayetteville Tennessee areas.

Like all of our moving sites, visitors can get an instant online estimate without having to give up personal information.  We think that’s a pretty cool feature, hopefully it’s one that drives more business.

I am playing around with a new site that helps people find horses for sale, aptly named www.FindHorsesForSale.net.  I wanted to provide searchers some background on the particular horse breed they were looking at, so I decided to provide the first few paragraphs from the wikipedia page for that horse breed, and then link off to the full wikipedia page.  For example, see the content on the lower left of the paso fino horses for sale page.

After some searching around, I found the perfect tool – the wikipedia-client gem on github.   As Judge Smails from Caddy Shack would say, “top notch, top notch!”

Here’s some quick code:

      page = Wikipedia.find(horse_page_name)